Data and Cities Conference

As part of their project City Tracking, Stamen is hosting an invitation-only conference on Data Visualization and Cities on February 9-11, 2011, in their offices in San Francisco. The goal is to explore both the current state and the near horizons of this up-surging field in a convergence of practitioners in the field, government data and stakeholders, innovators and visionaries. The conference will be a mix talks by the Stamen personnel demonstrating their work, Government cadre and visualization practitioners sharing their experience in the field as well as panel discussions and workshops. See the official website for more information as well as the speaker and participant list.

This is an exciting time for cities working with data, as the literacy level for visualization appears to be rising by the day, driving growing demand and opportunity for new and interesting ways for people to interact with their digital civic infrastructure. And as the field grows, we’re also experiencing challenges and real questions on the role that cities take in providing the base layer of services and truths that residents and workers can rely on. We’re looking forward to examining these phenomena in a setting where the mutual goal is to make a difference now and build the pathways to more digitally efficient services throughout urban America.

As said before, this event is invitation-only so why am I writing about it? Hopefully the good folks at Stamen will hear this call for making the content accessible to a broader audience. Having the the talks as a podcast or the slides from the presentations on Slideshare would be wonderful…